Janusz Baldyga. Monograph — Meeting around the book

On Tuesday, 13 October at 18:00 we invite you to the CSW Studio for a meeting with the participation of Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś, Paweł Polit, Katarzyna Słoboda, Marta Smolinska and Janusz Bałdyga. Free admission.

Published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Janusz Bałdyga's creative work, the monograph is an attempt at multifaceted elaboration of the artist's achievements, including both an analysis of his creative attitude and a reconstruction of the evolution of forms and artistic strategies that shaped his practice over the following decades. Its aim is not only to approximate the artistic silhouette of Baldyga, but above all to examine in depth the phenomenon of his performative activities — understood as a consistent process of studying the relationship between idea, body, space and matter. The monograph therefore covers a wide spectrum of issues: from early realizations, shaped in the context of the neo-avant-garde of the seventies, through experiments in ephemeral and intermediate art, to contemporary performances, in which the reflection on time, balance and presence takes on a philosophical dimension.

Janusz Bałdyga (born 1954 in Lublin)

member and co-founder of the artistic group PRACOWNIA (1976—81), co-leader with Jerzy Onuch and Łukasz Szajna of the Pracownia Gallery at the Dziekanka Student Centre for Artistic Circumstances (1976—79) in Warsaw. Since 1979 he has been a member of the Akademia Ruchu theatre. He is currently an educator at UAP. He is the author of drawings, objects, installations, performances and street activities. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, symposia and artistic manifestations in Poland and abroad. Janusz Bałdyga is mainly involved in performance activities. He developed his original character of artistic expressions, in which he consistently reduces language and means of articulation, creatively using simple elements, creating elementary structures from them: a line, a circle, a rectangle, a point. Bałdyga uses the concept of “significant places”, in which the sense of space and its conditions and the dynamics brought to it by human presence are of great importance. Bałdyga's performative works strongly suggest a sense of drawing the viewer into the space and the course of the ritual. Their social, political or philosophical subtext leaves no doubt about the country and tradition of the artist's origin, and at the same time does not obscure the universal dimension of so very individual messages. As he himself says: “I am not a commentator, but a perpetrator of a specific situation, which certainly, situated in a specific time and space, cannot be free from social and political references.”

Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś (she/her)

for 25 years he has been creating programs dedicated to the art of Lower Silesia and Wrocław, systematizing and contextualizing the activities and creative concepts of artistic people whose achievements have not yet been thoroughly analyzed in the context of European and world art. Since 2016 he has been the Head of the Visual Arts Department at the Centre for Culture and Art in Wrocław. He is currently working on the author's Polish Performance Festival and on the International Performance Festival “New Perspectives”.

Paweł Polit

curator at the Museum of Art in Łódź, author of texts about art. Curator of exhibitions at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and the Museum of Art in Łódź. His texts have been published in exhibition catalogues, conference materials and in magazines: Afterall, ArtMargines, Obieg and Piktogram.

Katarzyna Sloboda

curator, choreography researcher, dance playwright, doctor of humanities. Lecturer in Curatorship at the Academy of Arts in Szczecin. In the years 2009—2022 associated with the Museum of Art in Łódź. Editor and author of publications and texts on contemporary art, choreography and performance practices. She is the author of Embodied Mindfulness in Selected Practices of Contemporary Dance (IS PAN, NiMiT, Warsaw 2023).

Marta Smolinska

historian and art critic, as well as curator. She is primarily interested in art and art theory as well as art criticism and curatorial strategies of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century. In her previous studies, however, she also dealt with art around 1900 and art of the first half of the 20th century. Previously, the focus of her research interests was the non-representational easel image and the processes of transformation to which it underwent after 1945. Recently, she has worked, among others, on the relationship between video projection and easel painting from the 1960s to the present, the phenomenon of haptics in contemporary art and the revaluation of the hierarchy of the senses, the issue of the corporeality of the image, the anthropology of the skin in painting, the motif of hair in contemporary art and illegibility in relation to writing and palimpsest. It also analyzes new types of monuments.

The co-organizer of the meeting is the Centre for Culture and Art in Wrocław — Institute of Culture of the Lower Silesian Voivodship Self-Government.

The monograph was co-financed from the funds of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from the Fund for the Promotion of Culture - a state special purpose fund and from the budget of the Local Government of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship.